REVIEW: Embrace, Manchester O2 Ritz

Danny McNamara’s in playful mood, quizzing the sell-out crowd on who coughed up for their seventh album Love Is A Basic Need.

Around half the fans in the 1,500 capacity venue raise one arm aloft.

‘I blame Spotify...’ he laughs.

Vinyl, LP, download...whatever format they now use to reach their audience, after 20 years, Embrace continue to be the band who defied the post-Britpop slide into obscurity and proper jobs which befell their peers.

Love Is A Basic Need reached number five in the album charts with little or no airplay, a testament to the power of the internet and their own devoted fanbase.

Here we are treated to their career highlights and a healthy smattering of more recent songs.

Such is their back catalogue, no fewer than 10 Top 40 singles don’t get a look in on the setlist.

And unusually with our insatiable appetite for nostalgia, it’s those later songs that take the limelight here rather than those that catapulted them into our consciousness all those years ago.

Wake Up Call lights the blue touch paper before the near perfection of All You Good Good People transports the audience back to 1998, bootcut jeans and NME front covers.

Come Back To What You Know provides the first full singalong but it’s not until Where You Sleeping and Refugees - both sung by McNamara’s brother Richard - that this one hour 45 minute love-in really ignites.

Refugees, in particular, is magnificent, proving the sixth album’s dalliance with synthesisers and thumping basslines was a worthy diversion.

That said, it’s their grasp of epic, soaring tearjerkers that has secured their place as indie stalwarts.